Was better when it was privately owned - Network Architect CDW Employee Review

I work for them both as a full-time employee before 2019 and a contractor in 2019. I would never work for them again as either a full timer or contractor. You basically have to work for them and give them free time and give up your work life balance for a long period of time to get a promotion. As a FTE They pigeon hole you sometimes and burn you out. They set you up to fail because if the projects you are assigned to don’t generate enough hours or have issues due to sales stream your billable hours are impacted and thus your bonus. They are quick solution providers not strategic partners so you need to give up on doing it right and get it done fast and dirty. This was not me. From my experience HR department is very pro CDW, and really does not look out for the interest of the employees so be wary if you ever find yourself in a situation where you know you’re right but you’re being treated poorly. I found it more difficult to work for them as a contractor because they grossly underestimate the effort and they tend to do the least amount of effort to rebook the customer for more work. It’s not a model my company agrees with. As a subcontractor that has my own brand and reputation to protect, it’s very difficult to go into situations where you are set up to fail. I worked on five separate contracted projects with CDW. All of them required for five or six times the level of effort as contractually agreed upon. I chased invoices for billable hours and travel expenses. Every contract had issues that resulted from pre-sales incompetence , not properly scoping the project and not understanding the technologies. As both a full-time employee and a contractor, I found that the engineers doing the work are generally more qualified and more knowledgeable than the network architects on the pre-sale side so this leads to situations where projects are grossly miss scoped.